This blog is centered around work on the topics binary analysis and reverse engineering on x86 / x64, with a special focus on Windows. There might be something about malware analysis here and there, too.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Small IDAscope update

I should probably visit more conferences. When heading out, it's always nice to get some fresh input from people. I'm currently at CyCon (Tallinn, Estonia) where I'll give a talk about the malware analysis workflow we are using at Fraunhofer FKIE. I'll add the corresponding paper to pnx.tf as soon as I get the approval.

The motivation for the latest little addition to IDAscope has to be credited to Hugo Teso, whom I met yesterday. I'm really looking forward to his Friday talk on aviation security, which will be related to the one he gave at HITB this year.

Semantics Profiles

The latest commit to IDAscope contains an extension to the "Function Inspection" part. It is now possible to quickly switch between different profiles for semantic definitions, which should open up this part of IDAscope for better usage in analysing ring0 stuff as well as POSIX or even other platforms.

IDAscope will automatically load all semantics profiles it finds in the newly created subfolder:

\idascope\data\semantics

Currently there are two profiles: First, the already known win-ring3 profile, which resembles the default that you know from "Function Inspection". Second, a placeholder file for POSIX. Only placeholder, because I did not take the time to add any specifications for it yet.
Actually, I'd love to see contributions from volunteers who have been actively using this feature or had told me were looking forward to this extension. :) Otherwise I might add new profiles myself if I have a good day or something.

The specification for a profile looks like this and should be easy to extend (JSON):

Future

Regarding future updates on IDAscope, I obviously took almost half a year off from developing until now. I hope that I will be able to spend more time on improving IDAscope in the near future.
It's especially sad that I was not able to finish the interactive call-graph feature yet that I had previewed in one of the previous blog posts. I am still inclined to finish this, just to give the time I already spent on it more value.
In parallel I will likely also start refactoring the storage of the internal analysis results. I have something in mind that could be done with it but it's not yet publishable, so I'll leave it with that.